Just curious as to why HDDs, SD cards, and other storage devices always have less than the advertised capacity. Isn't that considered false advertising? XD

01-04-2012, 08:33 AM

Shift_Lock

The manufacture puts hidden files on there and other crap. If you find the fine print on the box it tells you actual size. all the space is there ... you just cant access it.

01-04-2012, 08:41 AM

Tagix2

I'm assuming those files can't be unlocked and deleted... well damn, guess I'll need to go buy a 16gb.

01-04-2012, 08:47 AM

Shift_Lock

Or an HDD so you dont have to worry about it..

01-13-2012, 12:15 AM

isoguy

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shift_Lock

Or an HDD so you dont have to worry about it..

HDDs actually have quite a lot of "missing space". Its ok if a 16GB USB only has 15 GB for storage, but HDDS have WAY too many GBs used up by "system files".

01-13-2012, 06:48 AM

playerkp420

Advertised vs. Actual

Since consumers don't think in base 2 mathematics, manufacturers decided to rate most drive capacities based on the standard base 10 numbers we are all familiar with. Therefore, one Megabyte equals one million bytes while one Gigabyte equals one billion bytes. This isn't too much of a problem with fairly small numbers such as a Kilobyte, but each level of increase in the prefix also increased the total discrepancy of the actual space compared to the advertised space.

Here is a quick reference to show the amount that the actual values differ compared to the advertised for each common referenced value:

Based on this, for each Gigabyte that a drive manufacturer claims, they are over reporting the amount of disk space by 73,741,824 Bytes or roughly 70.3 MB of disk space. So, if a manufacturer advertises an 80 GB (80 billion bytes) hard drive, the actual disk space is around 74.5 GB of space, roughly 7% less than what they advertise.

Since consumers don't think in base 2 mathematics, manufacturers decided to rate most drive capacities based on the standard base 10 numbers we are all familiar with. Therefore, one Megabyte equals one million bytes while one Gigabyte equals one billion bytes. This isn't too much of a problem with fairly small numbers such as a Kilobyte, but each level of increase in the prefix also increased the total discrepancy of the actual space compared to the advertised space.

Here is a quick reference to show the amount that the actual values differ compared to the advertised for each common referenced value:

Based on this, for each Gigabyte that a drive manufacturer claims, they are over reporting the amount of disk space by 73,741,824 Bytes or roughly 70.3 MB of disk space. So, if a manufacturer advertises an 80 GB (80 billion bytes) hard drive, the actual disk space is around 74.5 GB of space, roughly 7% less than what they advertise.